Quoting from Godot: trends in contemporary French theatre

Anne C. Murch

In
its 1979-1980 season, the National Theatre of Strasbourg (TNS) featured a
play inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The text of this
play was made up of extracts from the dialogue of the original French version.
Such an event obviously constitutes a striking demonstration of the status
achieved by Beckett’s play in Western culture. But it also throws light on some
of the changes which have occurred in Western drama since the end of the second
World War. The present article will examine these two phenomena.

The
first performance of En attendant Godot in Paris, at the Théâtre de
Babylone in 1953, was received with indignation and scorn. The scorn and the
indignation were reminiscent of the treatment meted out to that other
revolutionary play, Ubu-Roi, at the Théâtre de I’Oeuvre in 1896.
Yet, a quarter of a century later, Godot continues to be performed
throughout the world. Starting from the stage and the shelves of bookshops it
has reached amphitheatres and classrooms, first as a prescribed text in
universities, then as a text for secondary school students. Reaching an ever
wider public in terms of cultures, age-groups and social classes, it
seems to have thrived on, rather than suffered from, the delicate process of
translation and interpretation. It has successfully survived the linguistic and
cultural differences/distortions which such a process unavoidably entails. This
very resilience confirms its universality.

What
seems to have occurred in this singular rise to fame is that the dramatis
personae first given life by Beckett’s writing, then, as it were, given a
second birth through their incarnation on stage, have rapidly left the narrow
precincts of art to become, perhaps subliminally, part of the collective
imagination of our time. They have become crystallized into living images which
Western or Westernized man in the troubled second half of the twentieth century
recognizes: he is moved by them and he identifies with them. Pozzo and Lucky as
the master and the slave, functionally interdependent, are to be found in all
walks of life. Estragon and Vladimir, as the ineffectual, likeable, incredulous
losers bonded in friendship, waiting for the miracle which tomorrow must bring,
are also present everywhere.

The
personae may have become somewhat simplified in the process. Their metaphysical
dimension has lessened as the period has turned its back on metaphysics. Their
comic strip features have been exaggerated as the world has turned to ever more
simplistic, manicheistic represen­tations of itself. And the detached quality
of their irony has sometimes been overshadowed by their simpler, rough and
tumble humour, so that the physical ‘gags’ are better remembered and better understood
than some of the subtleties of dialogue. But the characters still stand firm as
representatives of an existential malaise, epitomes of man’s floundering in the
prison of time and space, troubled by the riddle of mortality, the focus of a
bewilderment and pain daily experienced and rejected. Thanks to their powerful iconic1
quality, they can be used as models to give concrete expression to
instances in the here and now of a plight whose universal dimension they
initially articulated. They have become, it seems, a cross between archetypes
and stereotypes, inviting identification over a wide spectrum of existential
situations.

An
early example of this, and one which has been much quoted, was the immediate
success of the play with the inmates of San Quentin peniten­tiary in the U.S.A.
The dramatis personae, prisoners of the human condition, were received
as icons of the prisoners in the penal institution. The personae’s
general plight became ;equated in literal terms with the life imprisonment
which was their audience’s particular fate. Hence the immediate
identification.

Another
instance of this process, operating in reverse this time, was seen in an
Australian production of the play in Melbourne (Alexander Theatre, Monash
University, 3-20 March, 1976; director: Peter Oyston.) In this particular
case it was the staging which iconized the particular and the specific.
Beckett’s abstracted personae were made to fit the realities of the
Australian outback. Vladimir and Estragon were presented as ‘no­hopers’
wandering aimlessly in the bush, deafened by the roar of omni­present cicadas,
clinging to each other in a hostile environment which emphasized the rejection
of man. Pozzo became the icon of the colonial oppressor; Lucky, an
Australian aborigine, the colonial slave. The audience, entirely white and
urban, had no difficulty in transcending the regionalist parti-pris
and identifying with the plight of the personae. It was experienced as
their own malaise in a rootless culture in which they groped unsuccessfully for
some life-giving, structuring principle in a big city, urban but not
urbane.

Beckett’s
play, through a wide range of differences in stage realization and audience
reception, has come to offer a structured substitute for the apparently
unstructured complexity of raw experience in any one reality. The substitute at
once simplifies and clarifies this reality. It takes its place in the
collective imagination and operates as a stereotype. I am hence­forth
using the term stereotype as positive and implying in my context the
presence of an archetypal element.

The
antipodean ‘tampering’ with the play in the Monash production was minor by
comparison with the much more radical ‘tampering’ undertaken in Ils allaient
obscurs sous la nuit solitaire, the title of the Strasbourg production.2
In the latter the performing space was a disused hangar, rented by the
company in order to free itself from the traditional archi­tecture of its own
theatre. The spectators were forced to walk across the actors’ performing area
to their seats when the hangar door was finally opened. The whole length of the
hangar, and about half its width, were used as performing area. The remaining
space accommodated a few tiers of wooden benches for the spectators. The wide
performing area thus set up was lost in fog (this artificial fog spread through
the hangar while the spectators waited to be let in; water had been poured on
the concrete floor across which they had to walk). The fog remained during the
performance, though it began to disperse towards the end. The lighting was dim
throughout, with no use of light effects of any kind. All the light originated
from the props themselves. Surrounding a vast empty area in the centre, the set
consisted of a neon-lit bar on the left with large windows through which
could be seen a barman, endlessly washing and drying glasses and serving some
newly-weds who were the only people entering the bar. There were two cars
parked diagonally by the curb in front of the bar, the main façade of which was
perpendicular to the audience; the bar occupied a street corner; a number of
parking meters were aligned on the pavement. Facing the bar on the opposite
side of the stage were two shops, apparently closed, but with their display-windows
lit; in one of them a television set was turned on, as was the set displayed in
the bar opposite. Another shop, neon-lit and glass fronted, stood along
the back of the stage; but from what could be glimpsed through the fog, it
turned out to be a dentist’s consulting room with patient’s chair, drill, and
the usual equipment. Between the bar and the shop opposite, and closer to
these, a row of stacked supermarket trolleys divided the performing area,
structuring the space with the props of a consumers’ society already hinted at
in the rest of the set. Against the back wall and to the right, a door was just
noticeable, with two lighted windows high above it.

This
space, marked by diffusion, and therefore quite unlike traditional
concentration of dramatic space, was animated, not by four actors and the brief
appearance of a fifth one (as in Beckett’s play), but by ten actors. Four of
them bore the names of Gogo, Didi, Lucky and Pozzo.
The others were: the owner of the Citroen, the barman, the
bridegroom, the bride, the man with the Ricard, the man
with the clubfoot. The dialogue, consisting of extensive quotes from the
original, was distributed in segments among the ten actors, not necessarily
following the order of the original. The circular structure of Beckett’s play
was retained, though it was much less readily apparent due to the fragmentation
of the dialogue. Perhaps in order to compensate for this, the circularity was
underlined in powerful visual terms in the finale, where all ten actors filing
across the stage suddenly stopped, frozen in suspended animation, in a grim
version of a game of ‘statues’ in which no move forward could allow the player
to reach his goal. The action, as in Beckett’s play, was marked by repetition
and deterioration. However, the clear binary repetition engineered through the
two-act structure of the original was abandoned here. The show was
performed without interruption. The repetition appeared frag­mented over the
micro-structures.

In
Beckett’s Godot, the deterioration is shown mainly through the changes suffered
by Pozzo and Lucky in Act II. Pozzo has gone blind, Lucky can no longer sing or
dance, much less, presumably, think. The change is presented by Beckett as
wrought by life itself, by a fate common to all mankind. The perspective
changes in the TNS play, which introduces the following added peripeteia:
Pozzo and Lucky disappear through the door at the back of the stage into the
area indicated by the lighted windows; the play continues without them (as in
the original); then a huge explosion is set off in that area, sending bricks
and rubble flying in all directions; out of the wreckage cries for help are
heard, answered by Vladimir and Estragon’s memorable statements about being
called at last; when Pozzo and Lucky are finally dragged out of the ruins, they
are in the same condition as the pair in act II of Beckett’s play. The
explosion is associated with an act of terrorism by the audience. In other
words, the deterioration is ascribed here to a human agency at a particular
moment of history, rather than to man’s condition viewed in universal terms and
apparently transcending history.

The
deliberately makeshift nature of the space used by the TNS points to a
rejection of the format of bourgeois theatre, in which a privileged audience
may view in comfort a show put on for its entertainment and/or edification. The
TNS production undermines the dichotomy of stage and auditorium, in an attempt
to elicit from the audience a less complacent reaction. The response of several
spectators to the explosion suggests that the project had succeeded: they asked
each other in troubled voices whether this was part of the show, or an
explosion in earnest; feelings of shock and unease were shared by all. The
thin, shifting line between appearance and reality had gone, jolting the
audience into an awareness which would have been unthinkable within the
traditional theatre archi­tecture. The extension of the performing area altered
both the interaction between the characters and the interaction between the
characters and their space. Only one section of the area was used for
performance by the actors at any one time, except in the case of the final
frieze. The principle of a concentrated ‘dramatic’ time-space,
emphasizing the importance of the characters, was replaced by a loose space in
which the actors’ presence seemed a transgression: the lines they uttered, the
gestures they made, were immediately swallowed up by that space and reduced to
insignificance. Estragon’s statements in Beckett’s play: ‘Ce n’est pas le vide
qui manque’ were here made concrete in the sceno­graphy. In this respect the
TNS production is representative of a strong trend in contemporary theatre
style, which tends to favour the physicality of the stage as a transmitter of signs,
over the actor as the source of the all-important dialogue.

In
the Strasbourg version the setting of Beckett’s Godot has changed from ‘a
country road’ to a suburban landscape; the tree, an ironic reminder of nature
even in the original, has been eliminated. The change reflects a change from
the abstracted, timeless, metaphysical clowns of Beckett’s play to the present-day
urban dwellers of disintegrating cities. The passage from the rarefied, neutral
set to one displaying the signs of consumption and technology also points to a
change of focus in terms of the relative importance of man and the non-human
furniture of the world. The plays of the American Bob Wilson carry this growing
trend to its logical conclusion, erasing the human hero and replacing him by
tech­nology, presenting the new hero attended by a bevy of human puppets.

The
stage-lighting of the TNS was also significantly different. The waning
daylight was replaced by the neon-lights from the shops and the bars; no additional
lighting was used. The semiotics at work here are unambiguous: the creatures on
stage receive light from the worlds of consumption and technology only; they
are conditioned by a cultural bondage whose interruption would spell their
doom. The fog pervading the whole set reinforced the ghostlike character of the
humans groping in it- as they grope along, directionless, through their
lives .3

Finally,
Beckett sets the action of his play in the evening; his characters await the
arrival of night which will bring temporary oblivion. In Pautrat’s play the
night has already come, but it has not brought relief. Night is no longer a
time for rest and sleep, for tending the wounds inflicted by the day; under the
man-made lights, which are never extinguished, aimless living continues.
The demands made on man in the Strasbourg version are ever greater, the returns
ever smaller, and man’s compliance appears boundless. From the 1950s to the
1980s, theatre has more and more tended, it seems to me, to portray the sigh of
resignation, rather that the cry of protest, the dull hopelessness of life
rather than the lucid appraisal of it.

The
Strasbourg choice of pre-existent material as subject-matter for a
play is itself of considerable significance. ‘The Dramaturg’ explained in the
programme notes that the play was neither an adaptation nor a new staging of
Beckett’s play, but rather a work for the stage grafted on to extracts from
Beckett’s text. He was concerned to present ‘not an original or wiser version
of the play, but a faithful, black picture of our time, following the tone set
by all of Beckett’s works’.4 In achieving this the remarkable iconic
quality of the Beckettian stereotypes was further vindi­cated. Beckett’s play
and his personae were used as mediators, truer than life, to reach out
to, and to describe, the ever more elusive reality of our times.

This
use of pre-existent material may be seen (as in certain comparable Brecht
plays) as a kind of vast quotation from a product of the incriminated
culture. The product itself is incriminating, but in universal terms. Here it
is inserted more pointedly in history. Quoting is usually a privileged terrain
for irony. Not so here, where it is used both referentially and deferentially.
Yet it would obviously be wrong to see it simply as a homage to a writer, for
the ‘grafting’ is also a transgression of the cultural taboo which sets up
works of arts as sacred and untouchable. The quoting, here, acknowledges the
fact that Beckett’s work, by its exceptional resonance, has broken free from
such constraints. It confirms its passage into that category of the collective
imagination in which it appears truer than life. But in addition to being a
comment on the work’s impact, the process of quoting is clearly a comment on
life itself. Offering the `show of a show’ as a faithful picture of that
life, it suggests that life itself has become a show which can only be
apprehended through the mediation of the spectacular, i.e. the mediation of the
alienating culture. A society celebrating its own finality in narcissistic
fascination, vampirizing in so doing the individual and his natural
environment, is mirrored in a theatre about itself - a theatre delighting
in quoting itself.

Here
again the TNS play, far from being aberrant in contemporary terms, acts as a
paradigm of a trend to be found in plays by many present-day dramatists.
Their invention stems not from the observation of nature, or from the workings
of society, or from the now-discredited individual psychology, but from
the reflections arising from, and the inspiration provided by, secondary
sources: cultural artifacts, including dramatic texts.5 This process
of self-quotation is not, of course, limited to theatre: it is self-evident
that there has emerged in our time, not so much an art for art’s sake, as an
art about art, which acts as a comment on, an access to, but also a shield
from, a reality whose remoteness and complexity are experienced by man no
longer as a challenge, but increasingly as a threat.

The
most striking alteration effected by the TNS play is, of course, the
atomization suffered by the dramatis personae, now ten in number. The
Beckettian motif of the couple has proliferated and in the process the gruff
tenderness linking Gogo and Didi has disappeared. The four pairs, two of which
are now heterosexual, operate according to the bare imperatives of power in a
shifting master-slave rapport. Between them, physical violence erupts
suddenly and subsides likewise, in short bursts. The maimed personae
seem to react to stimuli beyond their control and beyond even their awareness,
as if caught in a dimension of discontinuity, a disconnected present. The most
powerful exemplification of this occurred in the episode of the ‘rape’ of the
bride which the TNS introduced into the play. Dressed in her wedding-gown,
standing in the rain, pressed against the wall of the bar, the bride was
subjected by the bridegroom to a brief coitus, his aggression followed by her
flight into the night, leaving behind the bridal veil to be trampled mindlessly
underfoot and reduced to a muddy, torn rag.

In
the TNS play the characteristics embodied in Estragon and Vladimir are
distributed over three pairs. The man with the club-foot and the man with
the Ricard, living in one of the cars, have assumed Estragon and Vladimir’s
tramp-like quality and their physical infirmities. The two hetero­sexual
pairs feature chiefly the grimness of the couple association. They represent
two stages of the couple in time. The wistful allusions of Beckett’s pair to
better times known in the past are now belied by the stage impersonation of the
bride and bride-groom, whose youth and youthful compact is presented as
no less hopeless. If the repeated reference to waiting is restricted to the
older doubles of Didi and Gogo, this in no way deters from the utter failure of
their younger doubles. Significantly the leit-motiv of waiting
shifts from waiting for to just waiting. The mode of waiting,
transitive in Beckett, has become intransitive here.6 Accordingly
there is no messenger as such, although the lone, silent barman constitutes an
avatar of the missing messenger - or even a degraded incarnation of Godot
himself. He dispenses the solace of warmth, light, and alcohol to the
privileged few, here the bride and bride­groom, i.e. the young. The bar is a
derisory version of the stable yearned for by Beckett’s tramp. Perhaps the bar,
heavenly stable on earth, stands for all that was once waited for, for all the
grand hopes of earthly fulfillment proffered by the messianic ideologies of
social justice and affluence. The owner of the Citroęn appears as an
offshoot of the pair retaining the names of Pozzo and Lucky, and it
appropriately falls to him to voice the philosophizing ascribed to Pozzo in the
original. He appears as a kind of seedy, disillusioned ‘guru’, a familiar
specimen in the modern urban fauna.

In
the Strasbourg version the Beckettian stereotypes have been weakened, split up,
and their charisma destroyed. Allowing the spectator a measure of
identification, Beckett’s Godot gave his own feelings of despair and
bewilderment a face, confirming him still in the notion of a personal
identity, however precarious. The TNS play bears witness to the crumbling of
even that residual, desperate, useless and hopeless notion of identity and
singularity - of that lost persona. The Beckettian stereo­type
remained lucid and ironic, the irony led to dignity of a kind. There is little
irony here, little dignity in the atomized stereotypes;7 they are
shown as completely dominated by their cultural environment and their appar­ently
mindless behaviour and relationships. They are at once bewildered and angry -
out of phase: like shadow-puppets barely silhouetted against the dim
light, whose manipulator has lost control of the rods, yet who somehow still
manages to jerk them into bursts of convulsive action, brief acts of bravura
followed by more despondency and powerless resentment.

Intent
on presenting a `faithful, black picture’ of our time, the play, in atomizing
the personae, reflects the further deterioration of the individual in
our time, his more deeply problematic status in the culture which manipulates
him - a manipulation which begins to show signs of faltering. Indeed the
TNS play offers a striking demonstration of a process which is widespread
throughout contemporary theatre: the dis­appearance of the character. The
demonstration is especially striking in this instance because the audience is
constantly receiving a double message: one from the atomized personae
moving about the stage and the other from the Beckettian characters in
absentia. The loss of power suffered by the original personae is ever
present in the minds of the audience as the comparison is set before their eyes
through the quoted dialogue. The TNS play achieves a telescopic rendering of
the startling passage from the death of God to the death of man, the former
embodied in the dialogue, the latter in the exploded original characters.

As
far back as the late plays of Strindberg and the German Expressionist theatre
of the twenties, the dramatic character was subjected to a process of
fragmentation; but the fragmentation, the result of an Ich-­Dramatik,
was as much an affirmation as a questioning of identity in crisis. The
fragmentation witnessed in theatre since no longer asserts or defends that Ich,
but rather celebrates its demise.

The
TNS play also sheds light upon the dialectic obtaining between drama (here
representative of literature and art in general) and critical activity. For
concurrently with the ever-increasing attacks waged on the dramatic
character by the playwrights themselves8 in this, the ‘age of
suspicion’,9 a critical approach has developed which ceases to take
the personae in their individual situation as valid units for the analysis of a
play’s structure. This critical re-appraisal finds its most coherent
expression in the exponents of a semiology of theatre.10 As
early as 1963, Roland Barthes in his Racine stated that characters were
mere ‘masks, figures gaining their differences, not from their social identity,
but from their place in the general configuration in which they are caught’
(the ‘configuration’ being that of the play).11 Patrice Pavis, in
his Problèmes de sémiologie théâtrale,12 urges: ‘We must
abandon the anthropo­morphic position which makes us posit that the character
is at the centre of the action, while the decor is relegated to [the status of]
passive characterization’ (p. 101). Anne Ubersfeld, in her Lire le Théâtre,13
like­wise states that the autonomy of the subject is to be excluded; according
to her, when this autonomy appears ‘it can only be [as] an illusion or a trick
serving a reductive ideology’ (p. 82). These critics may be taken as an index
of the growing consensus that only the basic subject-object relation
is meaningful.

The
‘character’ discredited as a functional model is replaced in a semio­logical
theatre by the concept of the actant, a term taken from narratology. The
actant, in a given play, may be an abstraction, or a collective persona,
or a group made up of several characters. A character, in turn, may assume,
simultaneously or in succession, different actantial functions. An actant may
even be scenically absent. The actant is never ‘a sub­stance or a being, it is
an element in a relation’ (Ubersfeld, p. 79). The interaction of the
actants orients the play towards its conclusion; it is the actants which move
the characters, and not vice-versa.

This
critical approach shifts critical analysis from an animate to an inanimate
vortex - from man as the independent engineer of his fate in an
anthropocentric construct to man as a meeting-ground of forces, some
internalized, with which he interacts. Or, as Pavis puts it: ‘each character is
a transformation and an externalization of the actantial code’ (92).
Furthermore, the belief in a meaning pre-existing in the dramatic
text and merely actualized - or betrayed - by the performance, is
also rejected. This erroneous belief, due to a logocentrist attitude’, must be
replaced by an approach [which considers] theatre not only as the staging of
the word, but also as the verbalization of the stage’ (Pavis, p. 12, my
emphasis).

This
actantial model is clearly the inspiration behind the TNS version of Beckett’s
play. The TNS break down the original personae into their components,
then redistribute some of their physical, gestural, and verbal characteristics
to create new stage incarnations. They dispose of the parent generation,
retaining their names as a kind of in memoriam for some of their
offspring. This, a disrespectful treatment in the eyes of the old-time
theatre-goer and critic, follows the logic of the actantiat model in
demystifying the importance of the characters as such. The original Beckettian personae
were already highly problematic, with none of the individual psychology beloved
of bourgeois drama. Now they become mere shadows of shadows, whose precarious
hold on reality is further weakened. At no time can this pale progeny be
mistaken for the moti­vating forces of the play - for the actants.
The spirit of the TNS adaptation is congruent with the dominant critical
ideology of our time, and must have been influenced by it.

The
TNS play, fragmenting the dialogue of the original, changes its status. The
quotation is presented as a montage. The conventional tendency to endow
dialogue with individual psychology is checked, the temptation to interpret it
as an expression of autonomous subjects removed.

Since
the dialogue is played down, the non-verbal elements of the message are
developed and diversified. The language of the stage, the set, the lighting,
the gestures and movements of the actors, costumes, the sound effects, the
music, the semiotic aspect of the dialogue as sound as against its semantic
dimension, are all painstakingly emphasized as the quoted dialogue becomes a ‘verbalization
of the stage’ in Pavis’s terms. The theory is reinforced by the praxis which,
in turn, is vindicated by the theory. Nowhere are the changes wrought upon the
original by the TNS more illustrative than in the treatment of the pair
retaining the names of Pozzo and Lucky, which is worthy of comment on three
main counts: (i) the nature of Lucky’s burden; (ii) the nature of the violence
suffered by him; (iii) his monologue and the reaction it elicits.

(i)Lucky’s
burden in Godot is the timeless burden of man’s oppression by man. With
the TNS it becomes specific and socio-economic: Lucky’s suitcase has been
replaced by a supermarket trolley which the exhausted drudge pushes and drags
with great difficulty. In the dim light of the stage the trolley with its
inseparable retainer also connotes a child’s perambu­lator, with a suggestion
that the precious life-burden has been replaced by the gross burden of
merchandise. The original suitcase still features among the props: the female
Didi carries it. It points to her personal subjection within the couple. The
transfer of the sign from Lucky to her is itself a statement to the effect that
all couples are variations on the Pozzo-Lucky compact.

(ii)The
new Pozzo does not display the physical viciousness of Beckett’s character. He
appears a gentle, thoughtful man in speech and manner. The only time he
actually uses force on Lucky is when he compels him to drink water until the
slave chokes. This, however, is done in order to keep him alive; with laudable
intent in other words. Yet Lucky is subjected to a far more refined form of
violence, which can dispense with brute force. Pozzo’s courtesy towards his knouk
hides a subtler form of repression, which has become institutionalized. In this
conception slave and master alike are reconciled with, and secure in, the order
of things; they no longer expect, in fear or hope, a transformation of that
order. Pozzo’s gentle ministering to Lucky as he wipes his brow epitomizes the
careful ministering of the prevailing powers to the complacent masses tamed by
consumption - even when the consumption amounts to the prescribed
quenching of an obligatory thirst.

(iii)Lucky’s monologue, a climax of the let-down in Beckett’s
play, is usually staged in accordance with the author’s painstaking directions.
The tempo is marked by acceleration and leads to a convulsive crescendo. The
semiotic level of the physical speech is privileged, the semantic level played
down. Any attempts to give precedence to the meaning of the speech by spelling
it out tend to fail in dramatic terms as they weaken the climax and lessen the
pointedness of the frenzied response to the monologue. In the TNS production,
thanks to the montage, it has been possible to give the monologue an
entirely new impact. Lucky is seated on the pavement throughout the speech,
propped up against the façade of the bar; the monologue is carefully
enunciated, in a thoughtful, edu­cated voice; the ka-ka-ka phonemes
take the form of wild stutters, the repetitions appear as a natural effect of
the fastidiousness of thought and speech; there is nothing frenetic or
hysterical about the delivery, and it does not climax in uncontrolled
acceleration. The sub-text surfacing in the silences and superficial non-sequiturs
is fully actualized; the tone is one of lucid, illusionless, intelligent
appraisal of the totally adverse fall-out left by the explosion of
knowledge witnessed by our times.

Changes
have also been made in the reactions wrought by the speech on the other
characters. These, multiplied as we have seen, attempt to listen at first to
the free entertainment provided by Pozzo; but they quickly tire of the effort
required; one of them lights a cigarette, another follows; soon they turn their
backs on the disappointing performer, and form a circle punctuated by the red
dots of their cigarettes. At first they jeer at Lucky, then they forget him
altogether, indulging in the fleeting con­viviality of their circle, exchanging
a few words, laughing intermittently, smoking. Lucky, meanwhile, painstakingly
pursues his diagnosis of failure; and when exhaustion finally overtakes him,
reducing him to silence, he slumps further into the night, with his chin
resting wearily on his thin chest. Later Pozzo, in his quiet, knowing voice,
informs Gogo that he may remove Lucky’s hat ‘as he will no longer think now. .
.’-a far cry from the original ‘gag’ in which the hat has to be
forcefully removed in order to put a stop to the threatening logorrhea.

The
frenzied, climactic character of the episode in Beckett’s play has been
replaced by one of calm and resignation in Lucky, boredom and unconcern in the
onlookers. The same ‘defusing’ process is used in the sequence in which Lucky
dances the dance of the net. The dance is performed by him in a sitting
position, the movements reduced in scope and limited to his arms and hands:
clearly the hold of the net has tightened over the years, leaving him less room
for movement. The dance elicits no unease or bewilderment in the spectators,
merely an eruption of hilarity shared by all - noisy, prolonged, mindless
and physical - and the episode is forgotten.

Lucky’s
monologue and the reaction to it on stage become a vignette for the
whole TNS play: both the play and the monologue attempt to raise the
consciousness of the audience - and fail. The monologue, in being given
such prominence, presumably contains a plea to the audience not to dismiss it
as their doubles on stage have done. But the plea is half­hearted, the utterance
merely an echo, quoting what already amounted to bravura in the original: its
appeal is aesthetic, rather than rhetorical.

The TNS experiment, intrinsically interesting as it is,
should not be conceived of as standing alone. Rather, it is an illustration of
a growing trend. Three more examples of this semiologically conscious theatre
may be quoted from my own experience during the 1979-80 French season. In
all cases, the theory of the actant has been heeded in the dramatic
praxis.

A
montage on Molière entitled Molière Molière was performed in Paris by
the Theatre de la Jeune Lune as an open air show in August 1979. There were two
moments when the actantial model came clearly to the fore. In the monologue of The
miser the famous lines were no longer spoken by one actor impersonating the
character or subject. This miser was in the centre of the stage surrounded by
half a dozen or more other actors. The miming of the scene and the distribution
of the dialogue among the actors were such that the driving force behind the
miser’s behaviour became actualized. The actant(s) took precedence over the
character and his personal obsession. Miserliness was exposed not primarily
psycho­logically as an individual failing, but rather in its sociological
aspect in a society where acquisitiveness constitutes a virtue. Secondly, the
seduction scene in Tartuffe, which was part of the montage,
featured a similar approach. On stage, in addition to Elmire and Tartuffe, were
half a dozen actors wearing masks and long, black robes, who were present
through­out the seduction scene. The mimicry of these scarecrows standing in a
threatening, grimacing group behind Tartuffe showed them up as his doubles and
his mentors. Thus physical embodiment was given to the actant at work through
Tartuffe, the influential faction of the power-­hungry bigots who pursued Moliére
himself. Here again the autonomy of the character was exposed as `an illusion’
through the actualization of the other element of the relation, the real force
at work through him. In both cases the concrete actualization of the abstract
actant made explicit the ideology implicit in the plays, grounding them firmly
in history.

In
the autumn of 1979 the Théâtre de Lucernaire in Paris offered a theatrical
adaptation of Flaubert’s Un coeur simple. Had it tampered with Flaubert’s
prose merely in order to extract a dramatic dialogue from it, it would have
been of little interest. Instead, it reproduced the text without any changes,
the creative effort being directed at the forces at work in the narrative -
at the actants. These, elements of the code, were acted out in
preference to the characters of Félicité, Madame Aubyn etc., who belong to the message.
The text was apportioned accordingly, not to the characters following the
dictates of superficial realism, but to these actants given stage incarnation.
Here again, the ideological context and sub-text of Flaubert’s ‘conte’
were made visually explicit in a rendering in which the ideological stage
of the time was verbalized through the text, rather than the verbal element
staged.

A
third example was four Molière plays (L’Ecole des femmes, Tartuffe, Don
Juan, Le Misanthrope) staged by Antoine Vitez.14 Vitez’s
production highlights the change in theatrical style in France away from a
naturalistic rendering. He retains the text in a position of pre-eminence,
but at the same time he introduces an extensive gestural element in the per­formance.
This ‘body language’ is neither a gratuitous concession to fashion nor a
superficial acknowledgement of the dictates of theatricality. Instead, it gives
expression to what is left unsaid in the dialogue, namely its hidden dominant
ideology and the way in which the characters accept it, reject it, struggle
with it. This, mostly unknown to the characters themselves, caught in spontaneous
ideology (so that it is fitting that it should not surface in the dialogue) is
shown critically through the physical messages their bodies send out. It
is thus possible to show at once the false, or at least biased, questions which
the characters ask themselves and the real questions which the play lays open
to the spectator’s scrutiny. In this way the audience is offered a double, dialogical15
decrypting. Vitez’s practice cannot be divorced from his theory, which it
vindicates. Belonging to the mainstream of French Theatre, his work may serve
as a fitting example of the growing acceptance of a new style of dramaturgy and
a new kind of criticism.

I
have dwelt at some length on this aspect of the TNS rendering of Beckett, because
the contrast it highlights is consistent with the process of change in French
theatre over the last thirty years. The theatre of political commitment
featuring man as an active agent of history (Camus, Sartre) was superseded, as
disillusionment set in on the political scene, by the ‘theatre of the absurd’,
which was contemporary with Beckett’s first plays. This brought with it the
return of universal man alienated in the cosmos and seemed to ignore his place
in history. However not all theatre followed that trend. Standing alone, and
perhaps closest to Artaud’s vision, was Jean Genet’s theatre of ceremony. And
partly under the influence of Bertolt Brecht, there has emerged a theatre with
socio­economic preoccupations, applying the ideological tool of historical
materialism to demonstrate the lessons of history (e.g. Adamov, Cousin, Gatti).
This theatre, often labouring under difficulties because of its didactic aims,
only occasionally succeeds in capturing the imagination of its public. The
allegiance it forms is often the result of its ideological stand, rather than
its dramatic qualities. It sometimes seems as if its subject-matter, not
always theatrical, might be treated more felicitously by the mass-media.
These, however, controlled by the state apparatus, only churn out the dominant
ideology. With universal man, that figment of the bourgeois humanist tradition,
largely discredited, and man as a victim of history not finding his voice in
drama, theatre seems to have reached a dead end. It has been reduced to turning
to itself for its themes - to quote from Godot. But the quotation can
itself become a new statement. As such, it also casts light on the direction
drama is taking thematically. Using Beckett, the TNS play re-inserts
universal man into history - but re-inserts him no longer as a
maker of history, but as a disillusioned, resigned victim of the historical
process. A victim, not so much alienated in a faulty consciousness of his
society, as aware of it, yet wearily bowing to its inevitability. A victim,
catatonically absorbed in the daily routine of couples, of waiting, of
consuming, still. Crushed by history, but gently so, nearly painlessly so, so
far. However, the shattering explosion featured in the TNS play suggests the
end of deceptive gentleness, the beginning of searing pain. These already
feature, for instance, in the recent plays of Michel Vinaver, showing the
victim trampled down by worsening socio­economic conditions and uttering a
muted cry of bewildered pain.

The
now frequent phenomenon of quoting in theatre may be linked with the
increased dominion of a culture alienating the individual from himself and the
world. Extensive quoting, in a creative work, however interpretive and critical,
acknowledges this alienation in submitting to the power of the cultural
mediation which only mediates back to itself. Such a process points to a
refinement, but also an impoverishment, of invention. Further­more, its appeal
is necessarily limited - the quotation used as subject ­matter only fully
speaks for an audience conversant with the original; there is a real danger of
theatre becoming a cult for the initiated few. One might view in the same light
the present favour enjoyed by the classics of the repertoire and see them as
subjected to similar limitations. They do not escape the principle of quoting
because of the cultural mediation required for their full understanding.

The
struggle of theatre over the last few years confirms its state of crisis. We may
indeed be reduced to ‘quoting from Godot’, and we may be tempted to
accept that in our bankrupt cultures the truly seminal power of theatre is also
spent. Except that, as a rose is a rose is a rose, theatre is theatre is
theatre, conjuring up in the multi-layered complexity of its signs the
memory of man’s mythical appurtenance to the world; briefly healing, through
the physical immediacy of its message, the mediate character of contemporary
man’s experience of this world: re-incarnating him through the flesh and
blood of the ritual of performance, even when the starting point is quoting
from Godot.

1
‘The
iconic is that which exhibits the same quality, or the same configuration of
qualities, as the object denoted - for instance, a black spot for the colour
black; onomatopoeia; diagrams reproducing relations between properties’.
(Ducrot, O., Todorov, T., Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences du langage;
Paris, Seuil,

5 In Arrabal’s The Tower
of Babel (shown at the Odeon in 1979 in a remarkable production by Jorge
Lavelli) a large proportion of the dialogue is made up of quotes from
Cervantes, St. Theresa of Ávila and Che Guevara; Arrabal’s own dialogue is
characterized by clichés taken from the cultural vortex. The whole of the
dialogue is undercut by the adoption of a grossly derisive tone. A play such as
Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guidenstern are dead, based on Hamlet,
follows a similar process of quotation, though in a very different spirit. Ionesco’s
Macbett and Edward Bond’s Lear are other instances that come to
mind.

14 Created by the Théâtre des
Quartiers d’Ivry at the Avignon Festival in 1978, since shown throughout France
and Europe, with its latest repeat season at the Theatre de la Porte St. Martin
in the autumn of 1979.

15 By this is meant the
simultaneous presence of two voices inside the same literary text, exposing a
contradiction. (v. Ubersfeld, op. cit., p. 97). The most obvious example of
this is Vitez’s treatment of the female roles in Molière, gesturally exposing
woman’s state of subjection in a patriarchal society, which requires a ‘dialogical’
reading.